Filmpolice | 41 points | Nov 20 2016 03:19:17

I am posting this here because it keeps coming up and we need to think carefully about it.

The claim is this (or something close to this): the police sketches can't possibly match the Podesta brothers, because witnesses told the police there was only one suspect, and the sketches were based on this witness testimony.

There are two reasons why this is poor reasoning.

First , it is not entirely accurate. Police did not conclude with certainty that there was just one suspect; far from it, they only tacitly believed there was one suspect based on preliminary reports. Here is the exact language they used.

And it is only right that they should use language of belief rather than certain proof, for that is how rational inquiry works.

Which brings us to the second (and more damaging) problem with the claim.

Due to the inductive nature of police investigations, initial suppositions based on preliminary reports can always be revised in light of newer evidence. If new evidence emerges suggesting that more than one suspect was involved, the original accounts would be revised. It would be contrary to the spirit of rational inquiry to maintain that preliminary reports have absolute, dogmatic veto power over any forthcoming evidence.

And that is indeed what we have here. The empirical resemblance of both Podesta brothers — down to the mole above the eyebrow — outweighs the mere supposition that there may have been only one suspect.

Here is a diagram showing that even the smallest details match -- such as the depression marks on the ridge of John's nose which would be caused by wearing glasses long-term, as well as the mole above Tony's eyebrow, the skin complexion, the 5 O’clock shadow facial hair, the distance between the eyes, the facial contours and symmetry, etc.

In order to continue maintaining this idea that the sketches must be automatically dismissed, you must (a) take the police statement out of context and attribute to them a much stronger claim than they actually made. They did not say it was conclusive , but that they believed there was one suspect. The language of belief rather than certainty is typical because investigators want to remain open to future evidence.

And you must (b) grant dogmatic status to preliminary reports so that any future evidence must be dismissed no matter how empirically compelling it is -- which is just bad epistemology. From the fact that initial reports suggested only one suspect, it does not follow that those reports are gospel and can be used to automatically rule out any newer evidence, especially when the latter is quite powerful on its own.

(To use a crude example, it used to be a deeply held and widely shared belief that the universe was static. It wasn't until observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation and other phenomena that cosmologists came to the unbelievable conclusion that spacetime itself is expanding. Now most everybody takes big bang cosmology for granted, but imagine if we had clung to the static view simply because it was "what the original astronomers said!")

In short, it is both factually inaccurate and epistemologically problematic to continue claiming that the sketches must be dismissed out of hand based on preliminary reports.

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